There are many things you might expect from a London cabbie: a witty anecdote, an anonymous ear, maybe some perspective on your troubles. What you find may be all that and more. Quentin Beroud, first time director but no stranger to the Cambridge acting stage, brings us Simon Stephens’s Bluebird: an insight into the variety of people’s lives from following Jimmy, a taxi driver, on an average night in the city. 

It was refreshing to see a play set entirely in a car avoid the lazy trap of neatly arranging four plastic chairs in line. Too many times has this convenient option been used, at the cost of infusing every scene with a nagging sense of amateurism. There was no such sense here. Tom Stutchfield gave an emotionally turbulent performance as Jimmy. As his character’s mood progressed through the night he could be comical one moment and sombre the next, and as his past was slowly revealed there is only word I could use to describe it – haunting. He coped well with the long periods listening to his fares bare their souls whilst always remaining under the gaze of the audience, though it was somewhat worrying that his eyes were rarely on the road ahead given the number of corners he seemed to be steering through.

This quibble was inconsequential, however, once Jimmy’s wife Clare, played by Helen Charman, had been introduced. The exchanges between Stutchfield and Charman at times made you forget there was a script at all; the dialogue shifted between the nervous laughter of an estranged couple and almost violent shouting without it seeming out of place in the slightest. The conversations with the supporting cast were not always as immersing, with occasionally the end of one character’s line slightly overlapping the start of the next as someone forgot there was a bit more to say. That said, Chris Born, as bouncer Andy, gave a particularly memorable performance in one of the more realistic conversations with Jimmy, as did Justin Blanchard as Richard, the slightly less likely, Tube engineer turned drug smuggler with a penchant for philosophy.

As you can imagine, the interior of a car in the dead of night is a dark place and the lighting is noteworthy here. Designed by Johannes Ruckstuhl and Rob Eager, it helped guide your gaze without being intrusive, combined with some nice on-stage lighting touches to the “car”. Overall the play made for engaging viewing, despite some first-night-nerves and the odd instance of dialogue overlap.